Annwn
by Starlit Skyline
Summary: The kingdom flourished under Elsa's rule, under her eternal Winter. Traders came and went. Treaties were signed. Life was peaceful. It was a frozen paradise... only it wasn't, because Anna was dead. ...very dark... / Elsa x Hans /


_AN: Okay, first off this is dark and depressing and somewhat twisted, just so you know. The pairing is Hans x Elsa, as stated above. Though this will focus mainly on Elsa, all the other characters will appear. Please read, review and enjoy!_

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><p>Annwn<p>

_by_ Starlit Skyline

**I**

When she looks at him, there's only one thing that comes to mind.

The Cold. Biting. Freezing. Bitter cold. It reminds her of Winter.

Hans sits in at the bottom of her new Castle, beneath the chandler that had almost shattered her along with it when it fell. Pillars of ice, like fingers, trap him within their grasp.

He sits in the center, saying and doing nothing, gazing at the floor as Elsa glares down at him from her spot on one of the staircases.

It reminds her of everything she hates.

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**II**

The first thing Elsa sees when she opens her eyes is ice looming above her. No, not looming – _protecting her_. She blinks and her eyes grow wide.

She lets out a scream, like some wretched, dying animal, and lurched forward reaching, grasping and dragging herself up by her sister's frozen shoulders.

The look on the statue's face is desperate and confused, but oh so full of purpose that Elsa has to choke back a cry. No, _what have you done?_

_No, no, no, no, no!_

Every time Elsa opens her eyes all she ever sees is ice.

It's always there, even when her lids are closed.

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**III**

"You seem uncomfortable, my servant. Are you cold?"

There is no concern in Elsa's tone, its as careless as the arctic winds.

It's been a month since Anna's death and since the ambassadors of the neighboring Kingdoms had left with their tails tucked between their legs. Despite that, Arendelle has began to thrive once again under the Ice Queen's rule.

Elsa looks down coldly at the shivering mess that was once known as Hans of the Southern Isles. Her delicate features twist into a disdainful scowl as she looks down upon her slave.

"Get up or I'll make you part of the decor." she hisses.

All around them, verglas and ice swirls and crawls up the walls like a greedy flame. People had taken to wearing six layers of clothing and the ice-thawing business had bloomed like wild flowers in the spring because of her powers. Arendelle has also become a center of snow-gear and warm cloths for all those to the North.

Thought the entire land is covered in ice, it rarely snows. Everything is frozen, like time had stopped dead in one, single moment. The moment Anna died.

Elsa snorts at the withering little thing on the floor, mercilessly, and says:

"On second thought, no. I can't stand the sight of you."

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**IV**

She leaves the doors of her sister's Palace wide open.

It's ironic really, the entire town had moved in to her former home. The ice had been cleared from within its walls and the people that had taken refuge there had taken up most of it's rooms. Elsa had never realized how big the Palace actually was, hiding in her room all the time.

One afternoon, she stands before her Father's portrait and remembers. Just remembers, but doesn't feel. Never feels. Just like he had wanted.

Elsa wonders if he'd hate her. She wonders if he's rolling in his grave now, along with both Mother and Anna, and wonders if he'd ever cursed the cursed child.

Elsa fingers her periwinkle glove, the one Anna had torn off, and wonders if he ever feared her as much as she'd feared herself.

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**V**

"You seem rather solemn this eve, my Queen. What troubles you?"

Hans voice is so sly and venomous it's practically dripping with poison. His smile is sickening on his porcelain face, grown as pale as the snow after months spent with her, in her little kingdom of isolated ice and winter. It makes him even more hideous than ever in her eyes.

She's facing away from him as they stand in her library, everything but the books on the shelves her handiwork.

"Why did you save me?" Elsa asks, not looking at him. Her eyes are watching the world through a window, searching for something even though she doesn't know what she's looking for. Some kind of Miracle? Yeah, right, she'd given up on those long ago.

He frowns – she doesn't need to look, because that face has been seared into her mind's eye over and over in her nightmares – and the bares traces of confusion mar his false beauty, the one that had already been stripped from him by the cold and biting wind that had whipped his body under his Queen's command..

"Save you?" he questions.

"When that man was about to shoot me." Elsa clarifies, her eyes boring into his as she finally turns to face him. Her gaze could have froze Hell over but, then again, his isn't any better.

Hans glares hatefully up at her and Elsa glares back.

"Tell me." she commands, all ruthless authority and royal prestige.

Hans sighs, his features growing in something akin to defeat. Elsa knows better. She knows it's merely an act.

"He was going to stab you in the back." he says "I wasn't going to let anyone else have that privilege."

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**VI**

"It's Anna's birthday today." she whispers to the empty room. The hearth is burning merrily in front of her, but its heat barely reaches her, light as the touch of a ghost.

Her snowman, Olaf, Anna's snowman, is wandering somewhere in the Royal Palace. He is searching for her, most likely. And if he finds her, it will be in the room her sister had wasted away in before running outside, towards the true love she'd never gotten to experience and her death.

Hans stands behind her, a silent spectator.

Elsa takes him with her whenever she leaves her Ice Castle, because the sly little weasel he is, she fears he could escape her prison.

Hans knows not to push her. He knows also what will happen if he does.

"How would you feel," Elsa asks suddenly "if I decided to kill one of your brothers?"

Hans doesn't react, doesn't so much as blink. "I'd say you'd be the one to endure most of the suffering, you'll certainly grieve over their deaths much more than I ever will."

Elsa chuckles mirthlessly "And they say I have a frozen heart."

Her hand stills from where it had been tracing patterns on the armrest of her chair and her back straightens. Hans feels dread flood him.

"Hans, come here." Elsa calls, and they both know he cannot disobey "I have a present for you."

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**VII**

Elsa watches Olaf play in the snow.

"_Bees'll buzz, kids'll blow dandelion fuzz__  
><em>_And I'll be doing whatever snow does..._"

It a sunny day and there isn't a single cloud in the sky. The snow beneath the sun is comforting and blinding brilliant as she lets herself fall into the waves of white.

"..._In summer!"_

Olaf sings a happy tune somewhere above her head. Elsa giggles, a hoarse, barren sound that somehow sounds inappropriate even to her own ears. She doesn't deserve to laugh. Doesn't even deserve to cry.

Elsa deserves to be locked up in that glass Castle of hers, atop a mountain and out of reach, with only a monster to live with and a monster within to keep her company in her prison. Yes, her prison. She'd built this Castle to be her new prison, just like the one of her childhood had once been.

This new Castle is just another prison, though this time Elsa is also a jail-keeper.

Her eyes wander to her reformed staircase, traveling to the closed door beyond. At least Hans wouldn't have the choice to ever step out here ever again.

"_Da da, da doo, ah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, boo__  
><em>_The hot and the cold are both so intense_,_"_

Olaf is still singing, the song happy and overbearing, and she lets herself loose her senses while she listens. Elsa's drowning in a world with no cold, no grief or numbness or loneliness – just her. Only her. But the song proves her otherwise, the singer even more so.

"_Put 'em together, it just makes sense__  
><em>_Ratdadat, dadadadoo,"_

Olaf reminds Elsa of Anna, in the way that this is the only good thing that had ever come of her powers. Anna's Olaf, her first friend, the friend she'd made for her sister when they were little and before everything had gone wrong. Maybe it was all wrong from the start, but Elsa doesn't like to think like that.

Olaf was supposed to keep Anna company, Elsa reminisces, to make her laugh and to stop her tears from falling when she was sad – to be there for Anna when Elsa could not. The Queen of Winter asks herself why she allows the silly little snowman to frolic and skip across her halls and dance around her in merry abandon, wonders why Olaf simply doesn't walk away from his creator, his monstrous mother, or why she doesn't push him away. And she wonders if she even has the strength to do so.

Elsa has no heart to tell him he'll never see the Summer. No heart to break and no heart to mend, just a frozen, unmoving lump in her chest.

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**VIII**

Kristoff had grown detached and bitter since the last time she saw him.

The first time they meet after Anna's death – the second, actually–

_He's kissing her with everything he is, everything he has, all his sorrow and pain and loneliness and want, and all that meets his searching, burning lips is death and ice beneath his skin._

–because Elsa had watched as he tried to bring Anna back to them, to kiss her back to life, to give Anna everything he is so Anna would become his everything. Elsa had watched as everything became nothing.

Kristoff doesn't even meet her gaze, rather his embittered face is sneering at the man who stands, wary, behind her.

Hans' hair now has more white than chestnut in it and the chains that bind his wrists and ankles had all but become part of him. For all his pain and misery, he doesn't utter a sound of discomfort or defiance. Hans just stands there watching, nothing in his eyes and his face placid, standing like a man before court.

Elsa and Kristoff discuss business and ice, all professional-like and detached – because it's the only way they can survive and not break down, the only way they know. Cold and detached, like the ice itself.

Elsa decides to stay overnight and leaves Kristoff to lead Hans down to the stables, where the ice-merchant would tie the former Prince's chains to a pole and stand guard. Elsa doesn't give them a second glance as she feels Hans' panicked look upon her back.

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**IX**

She finds him the next morning in Kristoff's stable, covered in bruises and bloody.

Elsa'd thought the sight would make her happy – now that he'd paid back just a bit more for his crimes – but strangely, it does not. Elsa stands in the wooden doorway, stunned. She gazes down at him and feels her heart thaw as he whimpers in pain and draws back from the slender shadow that had eclipsed his figure.

A beaten man. A broken one. With a heart of ice that slowly eats and numbs him cold, and Elsa sees herself in a jagged mirror. Her heart is twisting, so fast and so hard and she's painfully reminded that even she – the Queen of Isolation and Despair and Frozen Hearts – hides one deep within her flesh.

She realizes, with a pang of an icy dagger, that Anna – her poor, precious, tender-hearted baby sister – wouldn't have wanted this.

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**X**

It spreads through her being like ice covering the surface of a lake, freezing it over but never invading its core.

It start when Elsa orders the guards to take her slave and treat him when they get back to the Ice Castle. The seed then hatches when Elsa goes to check on him that very night, touches his cheek with her fingertips and watches frost cover already deathly pale skin. She hearts him whimper and feels something crack, then withdraws her hands.

The thing blooms and withers as she watches him get back up a couple of days later, already beaten and dying – if he wasn't already dead inside, like she was – and stares as he rights himself and marches forward, like it doesn't matter. Like he doesn't care if his heart is made of ice or blood, or the fact that he's cold inside or the fact that he'll never feel warmth again.

Like it doesn't matter that he'll die soon – but slowly, ever so slowly, Elsa's made sure of that – and that he knows not how long Elsa plans to torture him like this – days, moths, weeks, _years_?

Elsa suspects, it doesn't really matter to her either.

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**XI**

"Warm me."

"What?"

"I said," Elsa repeats icily, but her eyes betray her expectation "warm me. Make me feel anything but numb."

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**XII**

The first time they kiss, Elsa can't help but notice his lips are chapped and freezing. His fingers are like claws when he holds her and his arms are stiff and bony and enclose her to his hard, muscular chest. If she puts her ear to it, she thinks, maybe she'll hear a heart beating. Maybe she'd freeze it solid.

The kiss is desperate, but there's no fire in their passion. Elsa yields under Hans touches, her blue dress melting like water in his hands, she herself melting into them.

It's as though Spring had finally come to town...

...only she knows it never will.

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**XIII**

"What's this?" Elsa asks in genuine surprise. Hans holds her hand and his skin has already grown so cold Elsa doesn't even need to touch him for frost to cover and clings to his limbs. Hans' other hand is still in the air, gesturing widely at the new picture in the room.

"It is your birthday, my Queen." he says, in a voice that some might have mistaken for warm.

They're in the picture room, one that Anna had often frequented and is now a part of – because the painting in front of her elder sister is just that captured on canvas.

It's laud and cheerful, painted in a grassy field with trees that encircle it, chirping birds in their branches and squires and other such small, fluffy creatures gathered to watch a little girl blissfully dancing among them. There a happy, innocent smile on her unblemished face.

She has short hair of the reddest of curls, bouncing around her head like a halo.

"Oh, how sweet." Elsa says, and she might have meant it, in another life and another time unlike their own "You painted everything that I don't have."

Hans chuckles besides her, sounding only half as hallow as he usually does, and brings his other arm to rest on her shoulder as he moves in front of her, obscuring her vision of the dreamy painting.

"No," he murmurs, pressing his lips to her soft, cold ones "but it's everything that you wish for."

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><p><em>Please drop me a review if you have a second to spare! I'd truly appreciate any feedback on this, thank you!<em>


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